‘Criminal Minds’ season 12 spoilers: First look at ‘Profiling 202,’ key Joe Mantegna episode

For those of you interested in getting a key Rossi story on “Criminal Minds,” all signs point to you getting that on the upcoming January 4 episode entitled “Profiling 202.” It’s the character’s birthday, but it seems that he is not going to be having a particularly happy one. After all, just look at the title for the episode! This was intentionally named to be a sequel to the 2012 episode entitled “Profiling 101,” which was another episode that put Joe Mantegna’s character front and center.

If you’re interested in seeing what makes this birthday so terrible, we feel like the official CBS synopsis below (released earlier today) offers up a fairly clear signal of just that:

“As Rossi conducts a profiling course on his birthday, he receives a call from his serial killer nemesis, Tommy Yates (Adam Nelson), telling him the location of his latest victim.”

From here, we presume that it could be an all-hands-on-deck situation to try to figure out how to stop Yates in his tracks. Hopefully that happens, since otherwise there would be a “Profiling 303” episode coming up in the future where he’d be a threat once again. While that would more than likely be great news for Mantegna as an actor (it’s juicy material, after all), we have to figure that it’d be terrible for Rossi to have to deal with a threat of this magnitude yet another time.

In addition to seeing a lot of Rossi in this episode (which we are thankful for since we haven’t had nearly enough of him this season) , the photo above seems to be a pretty clear indicator that we’ll be seeing a little bit more of Damon Gupton as Stephen Walker within this episode, at least in comparison to how much we saw of him in his debut appearance. It’ll be nice to get to know him better, and see how he fits in with the rest of the BAU team.

If you are interested in getting some other news when it comes to “Criminal Minds,” be sure to head over to the link here right now! Also, leave us a comment in the box below and tell us if you are excited to see a Rossi episode. (Photo: CBS.)